Blue-Chip Choice

By Ezra Bowen

The search went forward with all the secrecy that might have attended the selection of a Pope. And last week, when the Yale Corporation announced a new president to succeed the retiring A. Bartlett Giamatti, there was little doubt the university had picked a man of very proper parts. "We had a rather long list of qualities we were looking for," said Cyrus R. Vance, former Secretary of State and head of the search committee, "and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. had more of them than anyone else." That takes in a lot of people, more than 400 original prospects.

Schmidt, 43, filled two of Yale's requisites by being an alumnus ('63) and a renowned scholar: he presently serves as dean of the Columbia Law School and is a ranking expert on constitutional law. Among his books is Freedom of the Press vs. Public Access (1977), a bellwether text on media rights. PBS viewers know him as a probing moderator on last year's series The Constitution: A Delicate Balance. His academic rise has been dramatic. After getting his LL.B. at Yale in 1966, Schmidt clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren, joined the Columbia faculty in 1969. Before being named dean in 1984, he had become Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law.

The bustling Schmidt retains a boyish quality, never more so than when he is rooting for his favorite athletes, hockey's New York Rangers. His engaging lack of inhibition prompted him to accept a cameo role as a doctor in Woody Allen's forthcoming film Hannah and Her Sisters. Truth to tell, the movie appearance was set up by Schmidt's third wife, Helen Cutting Whitney, producer and director of ABC and PBS documentaries on such topics as McCarthyism and homosexuality, and co-author, with Eugenia Zuckerman, of a feature-film script titled K.589.

Schmidt pronounces himself "thrilled about getting up there and digging into" the prestigious office atop the 284-year-old school. At the same time, he admits to being "somewhat apprehensive about the complexity" of his role as Yale's 20th president. That role has been made easier by the incumbency of Giamatti, 48, who more than doubled Yale's endowment to a formidable $1.3 billion and pushed forward a $25 million building-renovation program. Giamatti, who has been offered a sabbatical from Yale and is contemplating a plunge into politics, indicated that eight years of fretting over money and maintenance was more than enough time to have lost from his scholarly research in Renaissance literature. The day after Schmidt's appointment, Giamatti joked to the New York Times that he might be remembered only by the "Giamatti Memorial Wiring System."

Schmidt is determined to reserve time for his academic pursuits and spend much of his presidential energy redefining Yale's academic goals, which some critics feel have become blurred in recent years. He wants no admission policy changes that could subvert the progress Yale has made from being a refuge for old blue bloods to becoming an institution with a 17% minority representation among undergraduates. Another priority is the need to correct Yale's faculty balance of only 18.7% women and 7.8% minorities. Schmidt also is set on shoring up Yale's natural-science studies, along with a moribund engineering program that his predecessor has been quietly resuscitating.

The Yale community offered virtually no dissent on Schmidt's selection. And the search committee was deeply pleased with its decision, doubly so at having avoided leaks, which eight years ago revealed Giamatti to be second choice. Although Vance was discreetly mum about alternative candidates this time, it was clear that, as a 19th century yachtsman replied when asked who finished second in the runaway victory by the U.S. in the first America's Cup race, "there is no second."

With reporting by Dean Brelis/New York